IAANAT (I Am A Navy Acquisition Type). Don't give me the "ditching the peacetime acquisition system would fix this" argument - innumerable, half-assed products are developed and dumped on the troops during wartime in the name of getting things to the field quickly.
Hell - that even happens during peacetime.
True story:
In the mid 80's the Navy finally exhausted the stock of a special switch used in the Posiedon and Trident Backfit weapons systems, the original stock having been purchased back in the 1960's. The couldn't, for some convoluted reason, get a replacement made to the same specification - it was about a half inch longer. (IIRC it had something to do with the connector plug - which would have had to have special production run as it too was no longer available.)
Now, when installed this switch projected into a plastic 'wart' glued to the side of a larger plastic cover. The Navy reasoned, logically enough, that it would be simple to proactively replace this 'wart' with one large enough to house the new switch. So they made up kits with the new 'wart' and some glue to hold them on and shipped the kits to the Fleet.
Where the new 'warts' promptly fell off within a day or two of installation.
Turned out - the contractor *and* the Navy QA folks had tested the fix at the training centers, which were not made of the same plastic as the ones in the fleet! There had been two production runs of the covers - but all the ones at the training centers were from the second, while almost all the ones in the Fleet were from the first. There were two runs because the training centers had exhausted the original stock - the covers their were removed and replaced on a weekly basis during maintenace training, while the covers in the Fleet stayed in place unless something actually broke, which it rarely did.
So does their device withstand extremes of temperature duration both operation and storage? High humidity? Is it impervious to dust? How does it handle shock and vibration?
Which is better: a theoretical device that has not been delivered, or a real device that may be unreliable?
From some whose life has depended on such devices? I'd much rather have a theoretical device over one that will be unreliable. (Not 'may' - will.)
The technology is there to do the scrubbing, the issue is more how do you do that process without using a whole lot of energy to do it? And of course, that energy has to come from a plant somewhere that is putting CO2 back into the atmosphere...
A lot of slashodotters are concentrating on where the energy will come from... I find a much more interesting question to be: Where do you put the output of the 'scrubber'? Bound as a reasonable solid of some form, how much volume are we talking? I'm rejecting liquid CO2 or dry ice out of hand due to the energy requirements of storing it. No can you strip the O2 off of it - pure carbon is flammable as hell.
Ideally, you'd run the process on solar energy I suppose. Hmm... an air scrubber that runs on solar energy. Sounds suspiciously like a tree!
If only it were that simple - elsewhere someone has calculated that it would require an area twice the size of Texas to hold enough trees. I can't think of an area that large that a) will support trees without massive intervention and, b) it won't constitute a massive ecological disaster in it's own right to rip out what is there and replace it with trees. Even if such an area existed - it's still not simple, you need to design your farm carefully (avoiding monoculture and having tall trees shade smaller ones), and protect it from pests, disease, and fire.
Now, a solution that will occur to any slashdotter worth his salt is to go distributed - plant 'em all over the place. Now you run into the problem of tracking 2.25 * 10^11 trees scattered over the face of the earth. A daunting prospect to say the least.
On a more serious note, submariners do not spend the entirety of the time submerged away from civilisation. They probably spend at the absolute most a month outside of human contact at sea.
SSBN patrols are 60-90 days long - port calls are extremely rare. SSN's routinely spend 60+ days underway, and frequently longer. Times at sea of a month or less (on a routine basis) are essentially non-existent.
Remember while a nuclear submarine can run damn near indefinitely (until the uranium/plutonium runs out) the food supply cannot last indefinitely. You'll have stop off's at friendly ports to resupply, get r&r etc.
What you say is true - but submarines have quite a bit of storage space dedicated to food. American submarines are, by design, capable of being deployed for 90+ days. We don't routinely stay out for 90+ days so as to keep resetting the 'clock'.
I never stayed at a Holiday Inn Express - but I did spend ten years in the Submarine Service.
Besides, who wants to reproduce all the wikipedia knowledge into a new database? Let's just improve the one we have already.
What I find fascinating is the duality expressed here.
One of the most often cited advantages F/OSS material is that it can be forked - you don't like what the current team is doing? Take the source, fork it, and go your own way - let the market sort it out.
Yet, every time the Citi has been discussed on Slashdot - we get one or more highly moderated posts explaining that forking Wikipedia is Bad, and Should Not Be Done.
He's been doing what you say since before 9/11. He wrote in the introduction to "Secrets and Lies" that he had an "epiphany" one day that security isn't about cryptography (like it was when he was just a cryptographer), but that it was about managing risk.
Then he's extraordinarily ignorant of his own field - I first encountered the idea that security wasn't just about cryptography in the mid 70's while reading Kahn's The Codebreakers (itself written in 1967). The more general idea that security is about risk (vulnerability) reduction is equally widely known - I've read it in [commercial] security manuals from the 60's. Reading the Amazon reviews of Secrets and Lies merely confirms that he is peddling and new and amazing concepts already widely known among actual security professionals - so widely known they made their way into the nonprofessional works on the field as well. (He gets glowing reviews on Amazon from computer geeks mostly because computers geeks are so painfully stupid about things other than computers - as well as insufferably arrogant that, because they are computer geeks, they know more than anyone else about anything.)
Oh, and by the way he had just founded the company that you should hire to manage your risk for you. So, Bruce Schinier was transformed from a cryptography to a "security expert" (read, risk manager).
The first step towards respectability for any snake oil salesman is to write a book - why do you think so many late night infomercial gurus are flogging theirs?
He's not a bad writer, and he seems to be able to convey a message to many people, but I've never found his observations to be particularly insightful. He tries too hard to break new ground, and he winds up coming up with this amygdyla stuff.
He's a pretty good writer - his problem is that he is an awful thinker. He gets a lot of attention because his arguements resonate with a certain moonbat portion of the American political spectrum - which gives him influence well beyond his ability. What he doesn't get is a lot of criticism. So far as breaking new ground grows - that little surprises me. He's a pundit - and pundits get paid by generating column inches and buzz, not by being right.
It never fails to annoy me when people take snippets of theoretical psychology and redistribute them as truth.
Bruce Schneier has been doing this ever since 9/11 - parlaying his reputation (well earned) in cryptography into a career as a security pundit (without any actual credentials).
If your library ponies up the dough for the top service,
Great. Now my local library, already facing a funding crunch to purchase non fiction books... Has yet another way to waste scarce cash on entertainment. Libraries are supposed to supplement Blockbuster and Netflix, and do the things they won't because there's no money in it - not compete with them.
Libraries in their race to become relevant - are becoming meaningless.
while the revelation of the compound is somewhat novel, research around diseases has supposed "breakthroughs" like this quite often. the quest for funding outright on the web seems awkward, since there's more than enough foundations that fund cancer research and medicine. but i'm not in academia, so maybe this is the norm?
i'm not a big believer in conspiracies, and if cancer folks will travel to the backwaters of the earth to get voodoo remedies, shark parts and holy men to pray over them, they will surely fund anything with even a glimmer of promise. if this works, i expect it to float to the top once the news catches on (and it works).
Based on the links provided by other posters - the appeal on the web smells to me not like a conspiracy, but as an attempt to dodge the review process associated with traditional sources of funding. I.E. the scientists know their science is somewhat dodgy - and hope to build broad public support for the research rather than to argue their case on its own merits.
The problem is a much deeper-lying one. Universities are selling themselves as steps towards getting jobs. With very rare exceptions (divinity, for instance) this was never the case, nor was it intended to be. They are not vocational institutions, nor are they designed as such.
Actually - historically, vocational training was exactly what colleges and universities were designed for. The trivium and quadrivium were designed to produce trained and cultured minds suitable to the clergy, the law, and to be administrators. Sons of the nobility attended because, when they weren't filling those roles directly, they would be supervising those fields. Education was designed to prepare one for ones role in society. (This is why 'going to college' was the goal of so many youths in the 19th and early 20th centuries - because being a college graduate marked one as being of a higher station in life.)
The idea of a university or college being a home for scientific exploration came rather later. The idea of one being merely to 'expand minds' is a fairly modern invention, or more correctly a modern ideal as it fails to correspond to any institution past or present.
Universities are not about drilling students. They are set up to expand minds. In principle a university could be a few comfortable seating areas around a vast library, with students exploring under the guidance of other people interested in expanding human knowledge. Add a few laboratories, maybe a few lecture halls for guest presentations, and you're there.
A fanciful ideal - one thats been around for less than a century. Somehow, nobody has been able to make one work. Or even, as far as I know, tried to make one work. That suggests a large disconnect between the ideal and the nitty-gritty of reality.
The writer of the article wants student numbers up, and shows little or no interest in the raison d'etre of the courses and departments in the first place. His agenda, as revealed by the article, is for universities to be, or to become, vocational institutions.
A study of history shows his agenda is for universities to refine their approach to something that they have historically done. Your belief that it represents a radical agenda for change is based on an erroneous belief of the roles of the university in the past.
This reflects my experience. I enjoy programming and time flies by when I'm doing interesting work. I've tried to share the enthusiam for programming with my two kids, with little success. Most people just aren't in to it, and that's fine.
Sometimes I wonder how many people get a similar kick out of their profession. Do lawyers thrill with the application of law the same way I love getting threads to cooperate to solve a problem? Or override equals so that a set works as specified?
My wife, a CPA, claims she does. I have no grounds to dispute her.
No it doesn't make sense. At a time when the internet provide dozens of different way to get that specific information, be it in several other on-line aerial-photo mapping softwares, or on various other online source, it doesn't make sense to try to restrict Google. It's like playing whack-a-mole against every source including blogs and online photo album sites.
Just because one cannot eliminate all sources of the information is no reason not to eliminate one source.
And besides, it's just security through obscurity, and we all know very well how much that strategy works well.
Actually, contrary to self-delusionary conceit of the Slashdot crowd (who, in their ignorance confuse computer security with the whole of security) in many areas of security - security through obscurity works extremely well. In [field redacted], with which I was formerly professionally affiliated, I know of multiple security measures that have never been discussed in public. (Despite the fact that the security issues surrounding [field redacted] have been the subject of public and academic scrutiny for decades.) Bad guys cannot circumvent a measure they don't know is there. (Sure, they can find out if they try - see below for more on that.)
You can keep secret a small password, you can't keep secret the outside structure of a whole building, that any plane / sattelite / hot-air balloon / small probe / home made autonomous mini-glider with a webcame stuck on it / etc... could see.
In the art of warfare, this is known as friction. Even if you can't stop someone - you can (usually with trivial effort and little cost) make his job harder. Professionals consider making the bad guys job harder, even by a little, to be a Good Thing. Armchair pundits and amateurs think otherwise.
I only partially blame the state, since if NC didn't do this, another state would and the jobs would go that way too, making NC a worse place for their residents.
Actually, being from North Carolina - I wouldn't be much bothered if 'improvements' to the state, like Google, did go somewhere else. Charlotte, the Triangle, and now the Triad - one by one shifting from being pleasant Southern towns to being cramped and growing metropoli with more in common with LA than the countryside around them. The majority of the jobs don't go to residents (natives) they go to imports - who want BBQ ribs (rather than Carolina style), and who shop at cookie cutter malls and live in McMansions.
Tell them there's a free operating system that's better than Windows, that it's available for free, you can try it out on a cd before you install it "for real"- for free- and that it's extremely resistant to viruses and comes with a dizzying array of programs you can install- for free!
Then tell them the rest of the story.... The 'free' software can cost you many hours of tracking down answers in obscure forums (and dealing with the scorn of the denizens thereof) in order to get basic functions (sound, video) to work. If there is a Windows program you absolutely must have - there may or may not be a Linux equivalent (back to Google and forum scorn to find it). You may or may not be able to import the data from Windows to Linux. You can spend hours (back to Google and forum scorn) trying to get a Windows program running under WINE - and still not have it work.
In the past nine odd years (I.E. since installing Windows 98), I've spent a grand total of about five hours sorting out configuration and driver problems. (Ten minutes when I installed Pirates!, five each for locating and installing the new drivers. Twenty minutes sorting out a USB problem with vendor tech support. The balance was trying to get help with an Open Source program which kept failing - and the best I got was 'when it breaks, reinstall it'.)
Properly installed and maintained (and the latter takes very little work if you practice safe hex) Windows installations Just Work. Free software? Well, it might work, it might not.
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/about_us/Dr_David_Suz uk i/Article_Archives/weekly07250301.asp to give you a high school primer on the physics of distance vs speed, which is noticeably independent of the targetting concerns.
And it's about as accurate as I'd expect a primer written by a high school student to be. I.E. badly misinformed and badly misleading. Oh, wait - this was written by a professional? (Takes a look at the website...) Nope, it was written by a geneticist who merely parrots the long debunked APS report of nearly twenty years ago and exhibits the same general ignorance of the technical issues involved common in the general public.
This guy either had very bad tax advice or is using the tax code as an excuse to wimp out of a somewhat dangerous experience.
As the article and any decent tax account would tell him, he would not be responsible for any tax unless and until he actually accepted the ride into space. This means he could have put off on any decision on whether to accept the prize until the very last minute. At least as far as the tax man is concerned.
My wife, a CPA by profession, says different. The ticket has a cash value- accepting the ticket is tantamount to accepting the cash, even if he never takes the flight. The article suggests that you make the argument that it has no cash value until redeemed - but the IRS may or may not accept that argument.
The only craft that matches the specs of those announced in the contest press release are those of the Virgin Galactic SpaceShip 2. And since Virgin Galactic's commercial craft is a minimum of 2 years from sending customers into space, he had at least that much time to defer his decision. His financial situation could be much improved by then. Since space craft are rarely delivered on schedule, he would likely have had even more time to defer his decision.
That's called deferring income. Businesses can do it under certain circumstances - but it's very, very dodgy for an individual to try.
Then there's the possibility that he could have worked his way out of paying much of any tax at all. As others have suggested, if he could have taken some on professional duties in the form of writing about his voyage, he could have partially or wholly written off his tax burden.
That's another dodgy route - as such expenses are usually only allowed to be written off when the individual is a professional [writer] or engaged in a related [space, travel, or writing] business. A one type expense of that nature, without evidence of an ongoing related pattern of behavior, is highly likely to be disallowed. (If you are lucky. If you are unlucky - a charge for tax fraud or tax evasion could also be yours.)
So why did this guy refuse the prize two or more years before it would have had any financial impact on him? Why didn't he look into any professional options for writing off the tax? Good question. My guess is either very bad tax advice or sheer lack of courage.
My guess is that he got very good tax advice - because I discussed the issue with a tax professional and she disagrees completely with you. She agrees that he could take a chance by choosing to defer or to attempt to create a professional justification - but emphasizes those paths of action are not without significant potential risk.
It's possible - but it's also possible that on audit the IRS will discover the dodge, and disallow it. If you are lucky, you just have to pay the tax owed plus a fine. If you are unlucky, you may face charges for tax evasion. (Keep in mind that niether the company that offered the prize nor the individual in question were in any business related to space flight - making these expenses likely to trip audit triggers.)
whether or not the system can defend against the recently developed random-trajectory missile developed by Russia.
And of course the article you linked to fails to mention whether or not the subject missile is real - or yet another Russian paper tiger.
Since the fall of the USSR, Russia has steadily released a lot of power points with various grandiose weapons, space accomplishments, etc... etc... All of the having essentially a snowballs chance of ever seeing the light of day.
It's really unfortunate that in this day and age you'd have to qualify a beautiful sentiment like the rest of your post like that. There was a time in this country, and not too long ago where you could say something like that and not have to cover your ass.
Yes - there was a period where people were deluded enough to think that such things were easily and cheaply doable. All we had to do was throw money at the project. (That these two beliefs are mutually incompatible seems to have not occured to them.)
Then reality sank in, the drunken buzz was replaced by a hangover - and it was realized just how hard and expensive these things were. And how close to absolutely zero the return of any kind would be for all the expense.
Competitors for the $10 million prize for the space vehicle spent 10 times that amount trying to win it.
Not even remotely. The word on the street is that SpaceShip One cost around $20 million - and Scaled Composites was the only entry that was fully funded. The remaining entries had essentially no funding.
It's also worth pointing out that historically, technology prizes tend to be won by point solutions - rather than the general purpose solution desired. The City of St. Louis, for example, was a specially built aircraft that was essentially an evolutionary dead end. The Thompson Trophy was supposed to encourage technology development for fighter aircraft - but didn't. SpaceShip One has the same problem - it's a point solution that scales poorly.
It's a neat idea. Are there any observations to support it? Peter Huybers from MIT just presented an alternative model which explains the 40 ky - 100 ky switch nicely without resorting to solar fluctuations. The basic idea is that you start out with ice ages every 40 ky, but at some point the ice accumulation retards heating, and one or even two thawing cycles get skipped. This gives you longer cold periods and a warm period every 80 ky or 120 ky. If you randomly distribute cycles with these two intervals, you can get a peak at 100 ky (but you can't just superimpose the sine curves with those two frequencies).
How precisely does Huybers model not depend on solar fluctations? His model, as described by you, is merely a frequency analysis of existing data - not really a model as it fails to describe what drives the sine waves. (Furthermore such statements as "you can't superimpose the sine wave" and "randomly distribute the cycles" are somewhat disturbing - it sounds like he trying to make his 'model' match reality without actually modeling anything.)
My own experiences are with the American and Japanese public education systems. Just to deal with the easy topic first, the Japanese education system is quite good, and the bulk of it is public. The main distortions are in the private senior high schools and the cram schools. However, before you start crying about the relatively minor imperfections (compared to the present state of American public education), you better remember the Japanese educational system was to a great degree patterned on American models, both in Meiji times and again after the war.
Um... No. post Meiji, the Japanese educational system was based on the British system - in fact, a great many of their social reforms were based on various British models. (The American influence didn't really start until after WWI, and didn't really take hold until after WWII.)
It is very rare for an engineering officer to make Admiral, even rarer for a supply officer or personnel officer, or, for that matter, a medical officer or JAG.
In fact - there are Flag positions for each and every one of the specialty branches. (Supply, Personell, Medical and JAG.) In submarines *every* Admiral has been an engineer - since you have to have been an engineer to become a CO.
These are all support roles, and if you've done your homework, you KNOW THAT IN ADVANCE. Admirals come from the surface warfare officer community or, in the case of carriers, through the aviation route.
That would explain why Submarine Squadrons are commanded by Admirals - as are Groups, and both COMSUBPAC and COMSUBLANT. Every one of them submarine officers - not SWO's.
Or, in short - you haven't a clue how the USN works.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell - that even happens during peacetime.
True story:
In the mid 80's the Navy finally exhausted the stock of a special switch used in the Posiedon and Trident Backfit weapons systems, the original stock having been purchased back in the 1960's. The couldn't, for some convoluted reason, get a replacement made to the same specification - it was about a half inch longer. (IIRC it had something to do with the connector plug - which would have had to have special production run as it too was no longer available.)
Now, when installed this switch projected into a plastic 'wart' glued to the side of a larger plastic cover. The Navy reasoned, logically enough, that it would be simple to proactively replace this 'wart' with one large enough to house the new switch. So they made up kits with the new 'wart' and some glue to hold them on and shipped the kits to the Fleet.
Where the new 'warts' promptly fell off within a day or two of installation.
Turned out - the contractor *and* the Navy QA folks had tested the fix at the training centers, which were not made of the same plastic as the ones in the fleet! There had been two production runs of the covers - but all the ones at the training centers were from the second, while almost all the ones in the Fleet were from the first. There were two runs because the training centers had exhausted the original stock - the covers their were removed and replaced on a weekly basis during maintenace training, while the covers in the Fleet stayed in place unless something actually broke, which it rarely did.
From some whose life has depended on such devices? I'd much rather have a theoretical device over one that will be unreliable. (Not 'may' - will.)
A lot of slashodotters are concentrating on where the energy will come from... I find a much more interesting question to be: Where do you put the output of the 'scrubber'? Bound as a reasonable solid of some form, how much volume are we talking? I'm rejecting liquid CO2 or dry ice out of hand due to the energy requirements of storing it. No can you strip the O2 off of it - pure carbon is flammable as hell.
If only it were that simple - elsewhere someone has calculated that it would require an area twice the size of Texas to hold enough trees. I can't think of an area that large that a) will support trees without massive intervention and, b) it won't constitute a massive ecological disaster in it's own right to rip out what is there and replace it with trees. Even if such an area existed - it's still not simple, you need to design your farm carefully (avoiding monoculture and having tall trees shade smaller ones), and protect it from pests, disease, and fire.
Now, a solution that will occur to any slashdotter worth his salt is to go distributed - plant 'em all over the place. Now you run into the problem of tracking 2.25 * 10^11 trees scattered over the face of the earth. A daunting prospect to say the least.
SSBN patrols are 60-90 days long - port calls are extremely rare. SSN's routinely spend 60+ days underway, and frequently longer. Times at sea of a month or less (on a routine basis) are essentially non-existent.
What you say is true - but submarines have quite a bit of storage space dedicated to food. American submarines are, by design, capable of being deployed for 90+ days. We don't routinely stay out for 90+ days so as to keep resetting the 'clock'.
I never stayed at a Holiday Inn Express - but I did spend ten years in the Submarine Service.
What I find fascinating is the duality expressed here.
One of the most often cited advantages F/OSS material is that it can be forked - you don't like what the current team is doing? Take the source, fork it, and go your own way - let the market sort it out.
Yet, every time the Citi has been discussed on Slashdot - we get one or more highly moderated posts explaining that forking Wikipedia is Bad, and Should Not Be Done.
Then he's extraordinarily ignorant of his own field - I first encountered the idea that security wasn't just about cryptography in the mid 70's while reading Kahn's The Codebreakers (itself written in 1967). The more general idea that security is about risk (vulnerability) reduction is equally widely known - I've read it in [commercial] security manuals from the 60's. Reading the Amazon reviews of Secrets and Lies merely confirms that he is peddling and new and amazing concepts already widely known among actual security professionals - so widely known they made their way into the nonprofessional works on the field as well. (He gets glowing reviews on Amazon from computer geeks mostly because computers geeks are so painfully stupid about things other than computers - as well as insufferably arrogant that, because they are computer geeks, they know more than anyone else about anything.)
The first step towards respectability for any snake oil salesman is to write a book - why do you think so many late night infomercial gurus are flogging theirs?
He's a pretty good writer - his problem is that he is an awful thinker. He gets a lot of attention because his arguements resonate with a certain moonbat portion of the American political spectrum - which gives him influence well beyond his ability. What he doesn't get is a lot of criticism. So far as breaking new ground grows - that little surprises me. He's a pundit - and pundits get paid by generating column inches and buzz, not by being right.
Bruce Schneier has been doing this ever since 9/11 - parlaying his reputation (well earned) in cryptography into a career as a security pundit (without any actual credentials).
Great. Now my local library, already facing a funding crunch to purchase non fiction books... Has yet another way to waste scarce cash on entertainment. Libraries are supposed to supplement Blockbuster and Netflix, and do the things they won't because there's no money in it - not compete with them.
Libraries in their race to become relevant - are becoming meaningless.
"Estimator" is right - other than the street number, not one 'fact' they list about my house is correct.
Based on the links provided by other posters - the appeal on the web smells to me not like a conspiracy, but as an attempt to dodge the review process associated with traditional sources of funding. I.E. the scientists know their science is somewhat dodgy - and hope to build broad public support for the research rather than to argue their case on its own merits.
Actually - historically, vocational training was exactly what colleges and universities were designed for. The trivium and quadrivium were designed to produce trained and cultured minds suitable to the clergy, the law, and to be administrators. Sons of the nobility attended because, when they weren't filling those roles directly, they would be supervising those fields. Education was designed to prepare one for ones role in society. (This is why 'going to college' was the goal of so many youths in the 19th and early 20th centuries - because being a college graduate marked one as being of a higher station in life.)
The idea of a university or college being a home for scientific exploration came rather later. The idea of one being merely to 'expand minds' is a fairly modern invention, or more correctly a modern ideal as it fails to correspond to any institution past or present.
A fanciful ideal - one thats been around for less than a century. Somehow, nobody has been able to make one work. Or even, as far as I know, tried to make one work. That suggests a large disconnect between the ideal and the nitty-gritty of reality.
A study of history shows his agenda is for universities to refine their approach to something that they have historically done. Your belief that it represents a radical agenda for change is based on an erroneous belief of the roles of the university in the past.
My wife, a CPA, claims she does. I have no grounds to dispute her.
Just because one cannot eliminate all sources of the information is no reason not to eliminate one source.
Actually, contrary to self-delusionary conceit of the Slashdot crowd (who, in their ignorance confuse computer security with the whole of security) in many areas of security - security through obscurity works extremely well. In [field redacted], with which I was formerly professionally affiliated, I know of multiple security measures that have never been discussed in public. (Despite the fact that the security issues surrounding [field redacted] have been the subject of public and academic scrutiny for decades.) Bad guys cannot circumvent a measure they don't know is there. (Sure, they can find out if they try - see below for more on that.)
In the art of warfare, this is known as friction. Even if you can't stop someone - you can (usually with trivial effort and little cost) make his job harder. Professionals consider making the bad guys job harder, even by a little, to be a Good Thing. Armchair pundits and amateurs think otherwise.
Actually, being from North Carolina - I wouldn't be much bothered if 'improvements' to the state, like Google, did go somewhere else. Charlotte, the Triangle, and now the Triad - one by one shifting from being pleasant Southern towns to being cramped and growing metropoli with more in common with LA than the countryside around them. The majority of the jobs don't go to residents (natives) they go to imports - who want BBQ ribs (rather than Carolina style), and who shop at cookie cutter malls and live in McMansions.
Then tell them the rest of the story.... The 'free' software can cost you many hours of tracking down answers in obscure forums (and dealing with the scorn of the denizens thereof) in order to get basic functions (sound, video) to work. If there is a Windows program you absolutely must have - there may or may not be a Linux equivalent (back to Google and forum scorn to find it). You may or may not be able to import the data from Windows to Linux. You can spend hours (back to Google and forum scorn) trying to get a Windows program running under WINE - and still not have it work.
In the past nine odd years (I.E. since installing Windows 98), I've spent a grand total of about five hours sorting out configuration and driver problems. (Ten minutes when I installed Pirates!, five each for locating and installing the new drivers. Twenty minutes sorting out a USB problem with vendor tech support. The balance was trying to get help with an Open Source program which kept failing - and the best I got was 'when it breaks, reinstall it'.)
Properly installed and maintained (and the latter takes very little work if you practice safe hex) Windows installations Just Work. Free software? Well, it might work, it might not.
And it's about as accurate as I'd expect a primer written by a high school student to be. I.E. badly misinformed and badly misleading. Oh, wait - this was written by a professional? (Takes a look at the website...) Nope, it was written by a geneticist who merely parrots the long debunked APS report of nearly twenty years ago and exhibits the same general ignorance of the technical issues involved common in the general public.
My wife, a CPA by profession, says different. The ticket has a cash value- accepting the ticket is tantamount to accepting the cash, even if he never takes the flight. The article suggests that you make the argument that it has no cash value until redeemed - but the IRS may or may not accept that argument.
That's called deferring income. Businesses can do it under certain circumstances - but it's very, very dodgy for an individual to try.
That's another dodgy route - as such expenses are usually only allowed to be written off when the individual is a professional [writer] or engaged in a related [space, travel, or writing] business. A one type expense of that nature, without evidence of an ongoing related pattern of behavior, is highly likely to be disallowed. (If you are lucky. If you are unlucky - a charge for tax fraud or tax evasion could also be yours.)
My guess is that he got very good tax advice - because I discussed the issue with a tax professional and she disagrees completely with you. She agrees that he could take a chance by choosing to defer or to attempt to create a professional justification - but emphasizes those paths of action are not without significant potential risk.
It's possible - but it's also possible that on audit the IRS will discover the dodge, and disallow it. If you are lucky, you just have to pay the tax owed plus a fine. If you are unlucky, you may face charges for tax evasion. (Keep in mind that niether the company that offered the prize nor the individual in question were in any business related to space flight - making these expenses likely to trip audit triggers.)
And of course the article you linked to fails to mention whether or not the subject missile is real - or yet another Russian paper tiger.
Since the fall of the USSR, Russia has steadily released a lot of power points with various grandiose weapons, space accomplishments, etc... etc... All of the having essentially a snowballs chance of ever seeing the light of day.
Yes - there was a period where people were deluded enough to think that such things were easily and cheaply doable. All we had to do was throw money at the project. (That these two beliefs are mutually incompatible seems to have not occured to them.)
Then reality sank in, the drunken buzz was replaced by a hangover - and it was realized just how hard and expensive these things were. And how close to absolutely zero the return of any kind would be for all the expense.
Not even remotely. The word on the street is that SpaceShip One cost around $20 million - and Scaled Composites was the only entry that was fully funded. The remaining entries had essentially no funding.
It's also worth pointing out that historically, technology prizes tend to be won by point solutions - rather than the general purpose solution desired. The City of St. Louis , for example, was a specially built aircraft that was essentially an evolutionary dead end. The Thompson Trophy was supposed to encourage technology development for fighter aircraft - but didn't. SpaceShip One has the same problem - it's a point solution that scales poorly.
How precisely does Huybers model not depend on solar fluctations? His model, as described by you, is merely a frequency analysis of existing data - not really a model as it fails to describe what drives the sine waves. (Furthermore such statements as "you can't superimpose the sine wave" and "randomly distribute the cycles" are somewhat disturbing - it sounds like he trying to make his 'model' match reality without actually modeling anything.)
Um... No. post Meiji, the Japanese educational system was based on the British system - in fact, a great many of their social reforms were based on various British models. (The American influence didn't really start until after WWI, and didn't really take hold until after WWII.)
So far as customs go, yes. So far as rules go, only somewhat.
In fact - there are Flag positions for each and every one of the specialty branches. (Supply, Personell, Medical and JAG.) In submarines *every* Admiral has been an engineer - since you have to have been an engineer to become a CO.
That would explain why Submarine Squadrons are commanded by Admirals - as are Groups, and both COMSUBPAC and COMSUBLANT. Every one of them submarine officers - not SWO's.
Or, in short - you haven't a clue how the USN works.